UPDATE 2: It's noon ET, and NBC has
finally started broadcasting. As expected, however, the
network idiots have decided to show the match on a 2-hour tape
delay (online, too!), so it's not worth watching. Click the
link above to see it live.

UPDATE 3: We kept the TV on long enough to
assure ourselves that NBC really was deaf enough to show the
whole match on tape delay instead of picking it up live in the
middle of a tense 3rd set. Having now assured ourselves of
that, we've turned the TV off. For the rest of the
afternoon, we'll blame NBC for making us watch on a tiny low-res
screen with commentary in Spanish instead of on a flat screen in
HD--but we'll be thrilled and relieved that we at least have that
option. There are 4,000 of us
watching live on UStream right now. Feel free to join
us. Or watch it here, in English.

EARLIER: Following on its disastrous "coverage"
of the Wimbledon quarterfinals, NBC is now wrecking the Wimbledon
semifinals.

Andy Murray and Andy Roddick are a tight first set (Roddick's up
4-3). ESPN, which owns the rights for this hour, can't show the
match on TV because NBC won't let them.

NBC, meanwhile, refuses to show the match online, because that
might dilute its TV audience when it finally bothers to put
Wimbledon on the air.

So here are your choices:

Watch last year's Wimbledon final on ESPN 2

Check the point by point coverage online at Wimbledon.org

Curse NBC

All of the above

NBC will take over the TV broadcasting rights at NOON, ET.
So for the next 45 minutes or so, we can pray hard that they'll
do the right thing and pick up the match in progress. After
all, 90% of the pleasure of watching live sports is...watching
live sports. And anyone who cares about an esoteric sport
like tennis enough to waste part of a holiday watching it wants
to watch it live.

But here's a little bet on the side... Based on NBC's
previous terrible coverage decisions at Wimbledon, we're betting
they're going to show the Roddick-Murray match on tape delay,
from the beginning. Which will make it a waste of time for
anyone who actually cares about the sport--who can find out the
real-time results on Google, on Yahoo Finance, and point-by-point
here.

We've asked NBC for an explanation of why it chooses to outrage
tennis fans (and Olympics fans) year after year like this.
We're asking not because we want to embarrass them but because
we're just stunned that the network could behave this way and we
want to know what the logic is.

It's about money, obviously. And in that regard, we
understand why the network wouldn't dare pre-empt the Today show
to show live sports. But we can't for the life of us
understand why NBC elects not to show matches live when it
finally deigns to put Wimbledon on the air.

Roddick just won the first set 6-4. We look forward to
reading how he did it.

Addendum: We have another question for NBC: Jeff
Zucker, we believe, is a tennis fan. We assume Dick Ebersol
is, too. Are we supposed to believe that these two folks
are settling for watching a two-hour tape delay?